So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead
languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues. The one
serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity,
with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public
flights. The other is for their common talk, tells who "flunked" and was
"deaded," who "fished" with the tutor, who "cut" prayers, and who was
"digging" at home. Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale
to the freshest Western "Institution," whose three professors fondly
cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect
with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of
'64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the
Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old
gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with
quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes
of the college-speech of their grandsons. Whence come these phrases few
can tell. Like witty Dr. S------'s "quotation," which never was
anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown,
like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister.
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